Slack has today announced its latest product designed for larger enterprise customers called Slack Enterprise Grid. The new product, which is essentially a modified version of Slack, is also a team communication app, though this time with the focus being put on how large corporations organize their workforces that can often be in the tens of thousands. The company believes that Slack itself is optimal for smaller teams, but once the number of employees using the service increases, the difficulty surrounding how to organize everything increases substantially. With Enterprise Grid, Slack hopes to fix this with a number of new features and changes.
Among the changes that are featured in the new product, Slack has introduced the ability to create as many workspaces as possible – something that with Slack is limited to just one. This new addition will allow larger corporations with different departments to create a separate workspace for each team, something that will avoid any confusion between employees from different departments. Separate workspaces do not mean employees will not be able to communicate with each other, though, with Slack allowing for cross-communication. Aside from the communication side of things, Enterprise Grid also introduces a new universal search button that allows for employees to search any team or channel they are part of in order to find a certain message or file. Lastly, with big corporations security is certainly an important part of communication between employees in order to avoid data leaks and Slack knows this, which is why Enterprise Grid also includes end-to-end encryption, while there are also a number of data loss prevention providers that are now available.
Regarding future plans for the platform and customers, slack has announced plans to introduce new ways of taking advantage of artificial intelligence in order to better handle information. In addition to this, the company has confirmed that it has received both HIPAA and FINRA certificates, allowing them to work with medical organizations and health care companies. For the time being, though, Slack Enterprise Grid appears to be off to a flying start, with Slack announcing that it has signed deals with PayPal, Capitol One and IBM to use the service. The company is clearly pushing expansion as much as it can and, with Microsoft only recently announcing Teams, it appears Slack is pushing as much as possible in order to slow their new competitor’s expansion.